Game info: RPGamer
Listening: emulated audio (missing 3 CD audio tracks and some jingles), YouTube
Credits
Music Compose: Hideki Tobeta
Arrange & Sound Effect: Kanta Watanabe
The composer is only credited in the game as “h. ToBetA.” Some resources identify this as ex-Namco composer Hideki Tobeta, but it wasn’t immediately obvious to me why this had to be true, because he’s never used that alias anywhere else and the game is by a different developer he otherwise seems to have no connection to, Fill-in-Cafe. It turns out that Tobeta would later rework the ending theme from this game, “Perrier,” into the song “Celluloid Star” on his 2008 album Blue Butterfly (released under his solo artist name Bajune Tobeta). So it looks like it’s him after all!
Info
I played through this game recently, it’s a cute li’l Zeldalike with an almost completely inconsequential town sim bolted on top. It’s not super deep and it does have some questionable gameplay decisions (what PS1 game from 1997 doesn’t?), but it’s charming and also you can throw moon rabbits at monsters and have them pummel them to death. There aren’t too many other video games you can do that in!
The music’s a bit of a fusion between cute-vibes sampley adventure music and EDM, so you’ve got club beats, vocal samples, and housey keyboard chords mixed with field melodies and town themes and RPG instrumentation. Very distinctively late ’90s CD console video game style of music, just listen to one track and you’ll instantly know where it came from. There’s a little dash of weirdness here and there too, like how the ending theme samples the newscaster voice clip from the start of Earth, Wind & Fire’s “System of Survival” for some reason. It’s mostly kinda okay.
As mentioned earlier, the composer Hideki Tobeta worked at Namco for a few years, where he’s probably best known for his Katamari songs. While there he also wrote music for Konami’s beatmania and other stuff under the name “Bajune Tobeta,” which he continues to use to this day after leaving Namco. I haven’t really listened to anything besides his Katamari music—which is more than I can say about the arranger Kanta Watanabe, whom I haven’t heard anything else by. He worked for Fill-in-Cafe for some amount of time and did audio for several other of their games, most of which I’ve never heard of.
Recommended tracks:
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“Boss Battle” samples some version of the Dragnet theme for some reason and is for sure one of the boss themes of all time
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“Hot Mountains” was my favorite variation of the main field theme that has like four different versions
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“Splashire Castle” starts off mashing a string pad with weird, syncopated timing, also there’s a beat missing somewhere in there
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“Moonworld” plays in exactly one room near the end of the game that takes seven seconds to walk through, so naturally it’s one of my favorites
(track titles are unofficial; place names are taken from the fantranslation)
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